We’ve added a new Cryptoart edition! Cryptoart is happy to welcome a new artist, Alix Branwyn. “pwned” is a mash-up of Day of the Dead and the crypto culture. If Bitcoin had its own Day of the Dead, we would remember that, while Bitcoin is secure, central repositories are not. Don’t park your coins long-term with a third party.

Below are a few pictures from “Proof of Art”, a Bitcoin art show in San Francisco on May 25th. Special thanks to Cryptograffiti for pulling it all together, and Coinbase for sponsoring it. In attendance was Troy Fearnow from Cryptoart, Max Mellenbruch of Kialara physical bitcoins, artist and writer Julia Tourianski, and @coin_artist. Speaking was Robert Norton, CEO of Verisart.

This is very exciting! RAI5 did a multi-part documentary on the history of Money and Art that was aired on Italian TV. As a forecast of the future, the last segment of the series covered Cryptoart! What an honor! We also love the way they pronounce Cryptoarte!

Bitcoin Black Friday in upon us, but The Bitcoin Halving is just around the corner. In anticipation of the event, Crypotart is excited to release a new art piece entitled “Bitcoin – The Halving” by artist Christina Hess. Additionally, we’ve come up with a unique way of alleviating concerns of missed opportunity when paying with Bitcoin — a full refund if the price of Bitcoin trades above the all time high before the Bitcoin Halving Event.

“The Bitcoin Halvening” as some call it, is an event that occurs approximately every four years and signifies a reduction in the rate in which new bitcoins are released. Sometime in July of 2016, the amount of bitcoin released in each new block will drop from 25 to 12.5. Since new blocks are generated on average every ten minutes, this represents a significant reduction in the dilutive effect of new bitcoin. 75% of all bitcoin that will ever be created will be released by this point.

“Many people feel like the price of Bitcoin will go up as we approach the event. We don’t want Bitcoin customers to feel like they are missing an opportunity by spending their BTC. This is why we are offering a full refund if Bitcoin reaches a new high.” says Cryptoart Founder Troy Fearnow.

Witness the amount of effort it took Christina to create this art piece in this time lapse video:

About the Promotion

The promotion only applies to purchases of “The Halving” and only if paid using bitcoin. The refund is for the full amount of Bitcoin, regardless of future exchange rates. If you spend 1 BTC, you will get a 1 BTC refund. The price must remain above $1,242 as calculated by the Winkdex for 24 hours.

Here are a few pics from our exhibit at Comicpolooza. Anecdotally, we found about 20% of the people had familiarity with Bitcoin. Familiarity in this case refers to only hearing the term and knowing that it is a currency, but not understanding how it worked. At our SXSW exhibit, those numbers were up around 90%. The inverse was true (only 10%) at a pop-up gallery we did in Memorial City Mall in Houston last month. Oddly, we counted 6 people over a four day period that had heard of DOGE but not Bitcoin — most were younger.

Lots of interesting Bitcoin stories out there. Stories of lost Bitcoin, missed opportunity, and unknown efforts that don’t make the Reddit/Bitcointalk forums. We talked to a guy that claimed he’s raising money on a private placement to add 100 Petahashes to the network!

We sold about 80 pieces of Cryptoart at this event. That’s not huge, but it is growing. We had two repeat customers. One person went home and researched Bitcoin and made a purchase on the last day. — That feels nice.

From a retailer on the front lines– the movement is growing, but it is still very early days.

As most of you already know, Darkcoin has now been rebranded as Dash. This took place after this edition was created, but before we released it to the public. So as not to undermine their rebranding effort, “Protectionism” will be a micro edition. Only 30 crypto certs will be published and 13 medium/large prints in total.